TechnoCalyps - Preparing for the Singularity

Technology is evolving faster and faster.

Not surprising when you consider that today,

more scientists are doing research than in all of history combined

and using superior instruments and communication tools.

New technologies like biogenetics, artificial intelligence, implants, and nanotechnology

have advanced vastly in the past few decades.

These various technologies seem now to be converging towards one goal,

to overcome human limits and to create new, higher forms of life,

to create something transhuman.

Robert Anton Wilson has been calculating this acceleration of knowledge.

He calls it the Jumping Jesus Phenomenon.

The Jumping Jesus Phenomenon is my name for the acceleration of information throughout history.

I first heard of that from Alfred Korszybski, a Polish mathematician,

who invented a scientific discipline called general symmetry,

and Korszybski noted that information was doubling faster and faster every generation.

He said we've got to be prepared for more and more change.

We've got to train ourselves to be less dogmatic and more flexible so we can deal with change.

He took the unit at 1 AD as his basic unit

to calculate how long it took for the information available to human beings to double,

and it took 1,500 years,

which brought us up to the time when Leonardo da Vinci was in his 40s in the Renaissance,

was at its height.

I decided to call this unit a Jesus.

So in 1 AD we had one Jesus, in 1,500 we had two Jesus.

The next doubling only took 250 years.

We already can see the acceleration factor,

and by 1750 we had four Jesus.

The next doubling took 150 years, and by 1900 we had eight Jesus.

The next doubling only took 50 years, and by 1950 we had 16 Jesus.

By 1960, in only 10 years, we had 32 Jesus.

By 1967 we had 64 Jesus.

And by 1973, 128 Jesus.

And the latest estimate I've seen by Dr. Jacques Vallée,

a computer scientist, is that knowledge is doubling every year.

But I heard that, oh, about five, six years ago.

I saw something on the net recently.

Somebody estimated it's doubling about twice a year now.

Obviously.

If we're experiencing more change now in a year

than we previously experienced in 1,000 years,

we can propagate that trend into the future

and see that a day will come when we will experience more change in an hour

than we have experienced in the past 20, 30,000 years.

A situation like that is unimaginable.

So we call it a singularity,

a place where the normal...

where the normal rules of modeling break down.

Modern religions have anticipated the singularity

by calling it the eschaton, or the end of time.

Technological communities have anticipated the singularity

by thinking in terms of artificial intelligences or something like that.

In whatever form it takes,

we seem to be on the cusp of a dramatic evolution

or a revolutionary leap into a deeper order of complexity

than biology or biology plus culture has been able to provide.

We're on the brink of something truly awesome and unknown.

A future where knowledge evolves at infinite speed.

It is clear that no regular human being

will be able to keep up with this acceleration.

This is the year!

Are you ready? Are you ready for the midnight clock?

There's no way to get up!

Some futurologists anticipate that species of higher intelligence

will at one point take over further progress.

I only bought a few days!

Let me suck on white people!

Jesus!

Only Jesus. I am talking about Jesus.

These might be artificial intelligences,

genetically upgraded humans,

or a combination of both.

So yes, we're living in the last days!

So we're living in the last days!

Most calculations anticipate this moment

to be between 2035 and 2045.

So it is not a far-off science fiction scenario.

You've got a sad, sad day coming for you!

How can we deal with such a future?

This is going to be the worst day of your life!

Are you guys only worshipping Jesus or like God?

It's like you're just saying that only Jesus can fill that place

and I'm saying that to every person there's an intricate savior.

It doesn't have to be just Jesus!

How do we prepare for such a technocalypse?

The singularity I put in 2045

At that point

the non-biological intelligence

that we create that year

will be about a billion times greater

than all biological human intelligence.

There are a growing number

maybe a few hundred people

who are seeing the writing on the wall

that these technologies are coming

and they will allow humanity

if we as human beings

as a species

if we choose

we could build God-like

massively intelligent machines

we could build God-like

with capacities

trillions of trillions of times

above ours.

They may reach a certain level

of artificial intelligence

where they themselves then

start redesigning themselves

the singularity

that idea

when a certain level

a threshold level of intelligence is reached

and then it's no longer human beings

who design the next generation

they do it

and they're doing it at the speed of light

electronically

Up goes the AIQ very fast

and we just lose control

we just sit back

and watch what happens

and they're the boss.

Well for a long time

I've been trying to understand

why there is not more

resistance

to various technological agendas.

The computer is an instrument

that enables humans

to be much more powerful

than they ought to be

and so anything coming

from the computer revolution

I will regard as dangerous

ultimately dangerous

in fact I would say that

20 to 30 years

we will see the catastrophe.

One of the things about technological development

there's never a moment that we can

as I say stop and evaluate

because everybody's saying

oh wait wait wait

it's going to get better

oh yes there are problems now

there are bugs now

but we will solve them

and so there's an infinite deferring

of evaluations and decisions

and that's irrational.

You're known as the mind

the mad scientist.

The accelerating pace

of innovation

is not only

destabilizing

but throws everyone really

reeling on the defensive.

Well we call it stress.

People are dropping

like flies.

Part of it is just the anxiety.

Is this the way

we want to live?

Why not slow things down?

What's the hurry?

I'm not interested in

a future where there are

post-human beings if I'm not one of them.

I want to be there.

It's very important to me that I live

and thrive in the future

not just to think about some robots

taking off into space.

I want to be there.

They could take advantage of

intelligence theory and wire up

their circuitry in a way that

make their mind stand plus plus plus plus.

Human beings

with our puny little brains.

There are two things that are infinite.

The universe

and human stupidity.

The human species

is one that

has a brain that's

already too big.

And now we have in the computer

something that extends

the power of that brain

almost limitlessly.

The machines are not the problem

but the monkeys behind the machines

that need to be addressed.

We're all stupid. We don't think very well.

We can't remember more than about seven numbers

in a row before our brain gives up.

We have very bad short term memories.

We can't think of long chains of reasoning

without forgetting where we started.

That's all design defects as far as I'm concerned.

So is that an enhancement to improve that

or is it repairing a defect?

It doesn't really matter.

We should be using technology to make ourselves better.

I am convinced that these

technologists at

MIT

in all their fancy laboratories up there

and artificial intelligence

are correct when they

say that the question in another

50 years will be

whether the machines want to keep

us around as pets.

Or not.

Who is to say

that for whatever reason

sometime in the future

those artelics may decide

you know, those human beings

...

Pests.

They are so inferior to us

they get in the way

they're eating up our resources that we need

whatever, taking up our atoms

that we need to go bigger and bigger and bigger.

I don't worry, well I do worry

but I'm not overly concerned about the possibility

that they will race ahead of us

and if we're lucky treat us as pets.

I think more likely what's going to happen

is that we will become increasingly

integrated functionally with our technology

with our computers, with our robots

and rather than it being a them and us situation

where they're the ruling class and we're the poor surface

underneath, I think we'll be much more integrated.

Well that is the most

tricky question.

Are we going to retain

the monkey meat?

Are we going to hang on to the body

and through the body have a connection

to the rest of animal nature?

Or are we going to

become disembodied

streams of electrons

moving in virtual

realities that are contained

entirely in circuitry?

I think this will probably

go both ways.

There will be fundamentalists

who want nothing to do

with technological transformation

and there will be utopians

who won't be able to get

enough of it.

This is probably the moral frontier

where we each personally

must make a stand.

How much of the new technology

and its reality

redefining quality

do we want to take

into our own lives?

We will have cyborg

bodies, we will have augmented bodies,

we will automorph ourselves into

whatever vehicle keeps us

in existence for the longest period

of time with the most pleasure,

the least pain, and the

most ease, the most elegance.

Everything that you need.

Everything.

Spiritually, emotionally,

financially.

The post-biological folks will say,

well, you people have a

primitive, atavistic attachment

to the species. Let it go.

Let it go. Come with us!

We're the bold ones.

We'll move on to the...

That's really scary stuff

to me. Really scary.

A great number of people

who I refer to as biological fundamentalists

have a great fear of

moving outside their biology,

moving into other bodies,

other forms for transport.

These people have a lot of

commitment, a lot of mythology,

a lot of tradition and history

attached to their bodies, our sacred bodies,

the house of our soul.

I mean, I can imagine myself

being a

moderately modified

cyborg. I mean, you know,

it would be nice to have my arteries cleaned out

and I'd like to have better memory capacity

and I'd like to be able to learn Chinese

in two seconds just by going

That would be great.

But

that to me is small beer.

That's nothing

in comparison to

what these godlike...

I deliberately use that word, godlike

artelics could be.

Well, it's a

philosophical issue as to whether

this is still human.

In my mind it's definitely

going beyond biology.

But I don't define

human as just biological.

I mean, we're already taking steps

beyond biology. There's not a single organ

in the human body, including

regions of the brain, where we're not

already creating substitutes

or extensions or augmentations.

So if somebody has a

an artificial pancreas,

are they not human? If they have a neural

implant in their brain, are they not human?

How about two neural implants? So maybe

you can have up to ten, then you're human, but eleven

you're not human anymore. If you have these

nanobots, blood cell sized robots

in the brain that actually have computers

interacting with your biological

neurons, is that still human? Well, one

nanobot's probably okay. How about five hundred million

nanobots?

I don't know how people are going to stop this,

although my hope is

that

when we

effectively destroy half of human

life on Earth through one technological

mistake or another, or a

combination of them, the diseases

that we are allowing to come out

now, or the

poisons that we create, or

the global warming, one or another

of these things destroy half the population

on Earth. The other half will

say, whoa, we've gone too far.

What do we do now?

Humanity will become extinct,

but in the sense

of a pseudo-extinction, in

that it is clear that if

we are going to be altering

our own biology, and

transforming ourselves,

that we are going to change,

and we're going to change in

enormous ways, in very unforeseen

ways, and that

means that homo sapiens, as we know

it now, will cease to exist.

But that's got

to be a form of madness. It's got to be a form

of techno-blindness

to want the

end of the human species to

transform it into a mechanical

species. It's a kind of

species side,

the destruction of a species

against a kind

of, I use the word,

deicide, a god killing.

If you choose not to

build these artifacts, in a sense,

you're

removing the possibility of

creating gods. It's a kind of

potential death of god,

if you like. Now, which is

worse? This is

suicide.

This is

ecocide. I think it has begun

to sink in, and there are many that would say,

stop! We've got to draw a line

there. But it can't be

stopped, because this

is a whole broad

front that is moving

forward. Genetics

is one aspect of it. Computers

are another aspect of it.

Communications are another aspect of it.

Everything is changing

about life,

and it's changing

increasingly rapidly.

Should we stop it?

Should we sort of say,

okay, AIQ,

artificial intelligence quotient,

at this level, we're going to

legislate,

perhaps even globally. That's the

cut-off point. No robot,

no artificial intelligence, no

artelect, if you like, is allowed

by law, by human law, to go

beyond that. Do you think

that's going to happen?

I don't! I don't think that's

going to happen at all.

There is no

human, there is no

social, there is no governmental

control over what these technologies

are doing and will do.

How are you going to stop

trillions of dollars

in the industry in building these

god-like machines? The robot

industry, the future Microsofts

and Intels and so on

in the 2030s, 2040s,

I believe will be

artificial brain based

and just enormous.

There may be enormous

political rivalries

for the

dominant country between China

and the US. Now if

that's the case, the development

of this artificial intelligence will just keep

going.

Even if it goes secret, even if the general

population start to really rebel

against it, they get really upset.

They are totally

by and by. But I

think the major reason why it's not going to stop

is about half of the

population will be ideologically

in favor of

it going on.

We are going to

become gods.

Period.

If you don't like it, get off.

You don't have to contribute.

You don't have to participate.

If you're going to interfere with me

becoming

God, I'll have big trouble.

Then we'll have warfare.

For one group,

you'd be building gods. It's just

amazing. It's

awe-inspiring. It's energizing.

It's setting a goal for humanity.

There's the whole universe out there.

The big picture.

And on the other hand,

the potential risk

of seeing the whole

human species annihilated by

these superior creatures who could just

And you did what you wanted

when you wanted. That you got

your God. You poured out

God's boundaries. You have your own rules.

The only way you can

prevent me in this

in this

50 year is to kill

me. And you

kill me, I'll kill you.

I'm anticipating

the most passionate war

that has ever been. We're not talking about

the survival of a tribe or a people

or a country. We're talking about

the survival of a whole species.

So the passion levels

will be extreme. I deserve

hell. You deserve hell.

You gotta see that you deserve

the wrath and anger

and vengeance. What I'm talking

about is a renewed embrace

of our

existence. It's got problems

and

it's finite.

But

I'm not

I'm not driven

to flight from it.

We have to learn

humility.

Species humility.

The more I think about

that versus that

the more

magnificent that becomes. Because it's

potential is just so much greater.

Billions of people get wiped out

on the cosmic scale

as a cosmist, right? If you try to think in those

that's nothing

compared to that. But if you can't see

that, this is

absolutely monstrous.

Probably most people can anticipate

horror. It's

a fairly simple concept to understand. People getting

killed, people get run over by cars all the

time. You just multiply that by a billion

right? That's relatively easy to understand.

That is much harder.

It's very exciting because

something will happen.

Without that

nothing will happen and maybe we'll have a

civilization that lasts for

a million years and does the same thing

every day. And then

when the sun gets too

hot or too cold it goes

away. So I don't see the point

I don't see the value of anything that doesn't change.

You're saying in

X number of thousands of years the sun is going to

explode so we have to prepare for it now.

And I say well

okay that's interesting but

how about preparing for

the essentially toxic shock

of our planet today?

Or if you walk around you see

a lot of people with no housing.

No place to live.

Not enough

food. So the explosion

of the sun can wait.

This is a moment in time

where for the first time we

can truly imagine

feeding everyone.

I mean this is something

new without precedence.

We are able to have more humans.

We are able to

fight against diseases

childhood diseases so that there

can be more people and they can live longer.

Isn't this wonderful?

Well no.

Of course it's not wonderful.

That's exactly the problem.

There are too many people and they're living too long

and they're using up the resources of the earth

for the human species. One species

out of a billion species

is using up all of the resources

for its own material

betterment. Every moment

that I speak another species

is being extinguished.

We are moving into

the unknown and we

see lots of possibilities

for catastrophe.

And the

immediate reaction is well

we should stop development in some way.

And yet we can't.

We're on this

you know this raceway.

We really

we can't stop it because

if we try to stop it

it will be completely unsustainable.

The human population

has ridden to a magnitude

that could not be sustained

without technology.

Well I can tell them

what we do now. We establish small

communities with small technologies.

It's very simple.

Just as we have today the Amish

who want to stabilize their culture

at a late 19th century level of technology

I can imagine a group

I like to call them the humanish

who might want to stay merely human

and say you know

okay we'll keep our internet connections

but let's not have any brain plugs

let's not upgrade our intelligence

let's just keep things as they are today

that's enough. And if they want to do that fine

I think they should be quite able to do that

but most of us I think will see the advantages

of living longer, getting smarter, refining our emotions

and our personality.

You can't go back and you can't stand still

if the thunder don't get you

then the lightning will.

We've been traveling this technological path

for 15,000 years

it's a little late

to now rear up

and try and turn in a new direction

our hands

our minds were made

for the manipulation of matter

and the creation of technology

so I embrace it

I think the future

is marvelously

exciting

and bright.

We have all these devices

I think that's a very good definition

because it's a very good definition

that if you're a biophobe

you're a luddite

to silence and dismiss

any and all criticism

not only as irrelevant

and irrational

but also as irreverent

that if you're critical

you're not being reverent enough

Why is it one of my life goals

to raise the alarm

to try to generate this debate

and I

ambivalent see if I were a hundred percent cosmos I would just quietly do

my work and not say anything just just do it right because I I want the

technology to be there and the faster it's there less less climbing time right

so more likely that the these art lex would be built quietly and then suddenly

fait accompli they're just there I think we need to downplay the caution and move

ahead faster the debate will heat up and right and then people take side and

then you start getting assassinations and sabotage

giga death the worst war that we've ever seen we have to grow up as a people

and the faster we do that the better it will be for us all I just feel

profoundly schizophrenic on this issue because it's so horrible and it's so

magnificent

I don't see that we are going to to go back you don't have that choice

we're going to be able to stop this

stop well are we gonna deny the creation of all this magnificent you don't have

that choice all this incredible stuff that may be coming in the future

you don't have that choice all this incredible stuff that may be coming in the future

that's a tragedy that would that would

horrible if we did that

they they could go anywhere like they would be immortal they would be immortal

you will be

dry

it's very curious that is what we're not able to be rational about this

presumably most rational activities if nature is holy

I love you

Anti-nature technology must be the devil.

I got a message from God, you hear me?

I got a message from God to do to y'all.

Now the most pressing issue is aging and death,

and human stupidity, which makes it so hard to solve problems.

So to me, now all the incentive is towards speeding up development.

The record is clear, the historical record,

that human beings are not capable of safely and reliably using that technology.

The potential for mischief is enormous.

And unless human beings somehow reinvent themselves...

Look, I think the solution for us today is the same as it was for the Luddites.

And the Luddites took a hammer like this, a big 10-pound hammer,

and they smashed the machines that bothered them.

And this is a machine, I think,

that bothers me, and bothers our life, and will destroy our life.

Here's what we should do.

Since 1978, the Unabomber has struck 16 times,

killing three people and injuring 23.

And this may be what he looks like.

Sir, are you the Unabomber?

Do you have anything to say at all?

Mr. Chad can make a statement, sir.

Are you the Unabomber?

Oh!

Dmitry Kishinsky was the Unabomber.

He was a brilliant mathematician,

an assistant professor at the University of California.

After two years, he resigned without any explanation

and went to live in a small cabin in the woods.

There, he proceeded to form his personal terrorist group,

send letter bombs to scientists and propagators of technology,

and become U.S. public enemy number one,

the bin Laden of the 80s and 90s.

In his manifesto, published by some major newspapers,

he fulminates against modern society.

He says that,

his opponents of modern technology are naïve in their optimism.

If scientists succeed in making intelligent machines, he says,

the fate of the human race will be at the mercy of the machines.

Kishinsky maintains that the bad and good aspects

of the industrial technological society cannot be separated.

Therefore, he declared revolution on modern society.

The destruction of the system must be the revolutionary's only goal.

The factories should be destroyed, technical books burned.

The alternative proposed by Kishinsky is going back to nature.

He calls it wild nature because he understands that this also means

giving up social justice, modern health care, and welfare.

I'm convinced that what the Unabomber was saying, a lot of people think.

He took it another step further, and as he says in the manifesto,

in order to be heard, I had to kill people.

Okay, or we, because he, the manifesto was written as if it were a group.

We had to kill people.

Well, that's a horrible thought, but it's also true.

How do we create,

the space and the attention to these issues, okay?

Kishinsky did it by killing people.

Well, maybe there are better ways of doing that, okay?

I don't know.

What can we expect in the coming decades?

The prospects of technology appeal to people's deepest fears,

as well as to their highest hopes.

A rational debate about the future seems no longer possible.

In fact, such discussion, by definition,

is beyond our human capacities.

Aren't we still too human to be prepared for becoming transhuman?

It is an enormous privilege to be alive right now,

and to be a part of this movement, and it's a very difficult time.

I don't deny that at all.

I look at it more as a birth pain,

that here is this change that's occurring,

and we're coming down the birth canal,

and there is blood around, and it's a difficult process,

but it's a birth that is occurring.

It's not a death.

And I think that when future humans look back on this era

from several hundred years in the future,

they will not remember this time as one

when we squandered the resources of the planet,

when we destroyed our planet, essentially.

They'll look at this as an extraordinary moment in time

when we developed the basic technologies,

the basis for their society.

We developed genetic engineering,

the ability to basically rework our own genetic blueprint,

which is something unprecedented.

It's never happened in three and a half billion years of history.

We began to move out into space.

For three and a half billion years,

life, all of life, has been constrained to this thin film

on the surface of the planet.

And now, quite suddenly, in just an instant in time,

we're moving out towards the universe.

And...

the third thing that has occurred in our era

is artificial intelligence, computers.

Suddenly, nonliving material is beginning to achieve

a level of complexity that rivals that of life itself.

So these are three things that are absolutely unprecedented

in the history of life, and they're occurring now.

And is it any surprise that this is something that is jarring

and shaking up the environment and causing extinctions?

This is going to provide the basis

not just for the next hundred years,

but for thousands of years,

tens of thousands, if not millions of years.

And I see a long future stretching out ahead.

Some people are already preparing

to become part of this transhuman era.

One of them is Terence McKenna,

an ethnobotanist who studied shamanism in the Amazons.

According to McKenna,

to get ready for a future life

where we will live uploaded in computers,

we must first prepare ourselves mentally.

The best way to do so, he believes,

is through the use of psychedelic drugs.

In a sense, this historical crisis

or this singularity that we're approaching

is like a transition from a low-dimensional world,

say a world of two or three dimensions,

to a world of four, five, or six dimensions.

This is what I believe actually happens

to a human brain-mind system

under the influence of psychedelics.

So in a way, the best practice

for the approaching singularity

is the repeated dissolving and reconstituting

of one's personality

through the use of psychedelic substances.

This is one of the most interesting

new psychedelics in the world.

This is salvia divinorum,

and it is definitely one of the plants

which will shape the next few decades

of the new millennium.

This is a coleus.

It's ironic that these plants,

which have been in our kitchens

and in our windowsill flower beds for generations,

turn out to contain psychoactive compounds

as powerful as any known to science.

These are not particularly interesting

in terms of drugs, but they're certainly bizarre.

When I take psychedelics,

I always do it in a shamanic style,

usually at night, usually alone,

in nature, if possible.

And then I watch.

I pay very close attention.

I use my mind as an alchemical vessel

for carrying out observations

on the union of spirit,

my spirit, my personality,

and matter, the physical matter

of the substance that I'm ingesting.

Nothing in human experience

is as much like the singularity

as a psychedelic experience.

In a way, it's a microcosmic anticipation

of this macrocosmic event in history.

When we take psychedelics,

we undergo a mini-apocalypse,

a mini-revelation,

and it positions us then

for these larger events

in the historical time stream.

Would you like to climb up here?

We may.

This is one of the most interesting plants

in the garden.

This is Socotria viridis.

This is the plant which causes the vision.

When taken with ayahuasca,

when taken as a liquid,

the experience lasts about four to six hours.

It's not as intense as smoking it.

Smoking it is the most intense experience

this side of the yawning grave.

When you can see the future,

it is a very difficult thing

to deal with the idea

that we are, in fact,

one of the last generations

that will live a normal human lifespan.

And there's a tendency for us, therefore,

to want these things to occur more rapidly

than they may actually occur.

This is the number one intellectual challenge.

Namely, you get to rejuvenate yourself.

Now, how much is that worth?

It's worth a great deal of money.

As a matter of fact,

when you get people my age,

it's worth all the money that they have.

I don't think people live long enough right now.

It takes 50 years to understand modern mathematics.

We're into life extension.

Bottom line, we don't want to die.

It's not a question of will we,

it's a question of when will we have in our hands

the interventions at the molecular level,

at the genetic level,

that will truly extend the human lifespan

perhaps hundreds of years into the future.

I'm not sure what methods are actually going to work.

But if you and I are going to live

until those methods become available,

we had better do everything that we can

to protect ourselves

by making sure that we have a healthy lifestyle.

And that includes

eating the proper foods,

taking your vitamins

and mineral supplements,

and it includes exercise.

And everybody needs to have

approximately a half hour a day of exercise

and stress reduction,

because stress is another way

that you can certainly reduce your lifespan.

Doing those three things in different ways

are a critical part of what I call the bridge plan,

the plan or recommendations

that you need to adopt in your life

in order to bridge yourself from where you are now

until the time

in which all of these wonderful scientific medical interventions

will become possible.

Some people say, you know,

if we live for a thousand years

or even two hundred years,

we will have nothing to do,

we will get bored,

and, you know, it will be pointless.

And I say, well, first of all,

how do we know?

You know, maybe we'll get bored,

maybe we won't.

And if we do,

we can always just stop taking the medicines

or we can, you know, jump off a cliff or whatever.

But, you know, how do we know?

You know, we should do the experiment.

But the second thing that I say is,

well, subjectively, you know,

if I look at myself,

how could I possibly ever get bored of punting?

I mean, what can be better?

What can possibly be better in life

than just strolling down the river

with a beer in one hand

and a poll in the other hand

You know, I could live for a million years

and I would never get bored of doing this.

Of course, some people will not be able to live long enough

to benefit from these therapies.

Some people who are already much older than me,

for example, much older than you,

have no chance, really.

I am 42.

I think I have some chance

of living long enough to live forever.

But I have a good chance

that the science will go more slowly

and so it will not be good enough.

So I think that anyone

who is interested in living a long time

should think very seriously

about cryonic preservation.

Cryonics.

There is experimentation now

with the possibility that a body

might be frozen and revived.

If the frozen traveler awakes,

what will he find?

The advance of science tempts us

to speculate on the nature of the world

which lies ahead.

They told a little bit about

the basic idea of cryonics.

And it just seemed like a great idea.

I think it's pretty cool.

Like, you die and you come back

and you see whatever happened in the future.

For me, I feel like it's just a waste.

You know, maybe I'm a woman,

so that's the way.

Cryonics is a procedure by which

people are frozen shortly after death

in the hopes that the information

that is encoded in the brain

will be usable in order to reconstitute

the person sometime in the future.

Some people currently only have

their heads suspended.

It's a cheaper process.

It takes less nitrogen to boil off

to maintain such a thing.

But there could be some arguments

that they're losing some part of what they are.

It is their belief that future science

will be able to develop maybe a new body

or an android or something.

More and more people only go for the head.

Not just because it's cheaper,

the process is also easier to control.

However, how to recover your body afterwards

still remains an open question.

But there are many examples in nature

to make it seem possible.

Some animals, like lizards, have the ability

to regenerate a limb after it is lost.

But in humans also, when a reasonably small part

of the liver is cut off, it can grow back.

Or when children before puberty

lose a part of their finger,

the finger can grow back to normal if treated well.

This indicates that this kind of regeneration

is not impossible.

It's not impossible because it's being done

by nature right now.

So if we can simply find those secrets,

the secret of the salamander,

and be able to find how the salamander regenerates,

then we may be able to apply

the same kinds of amphibian techniques

to human beings.

Other possibilities.

We may have vastly improved bodies.

They may be made of metal.

They may be much different than the bodies

that you're looking at right here.

However, the mind would be the same.

And with this mind in a metal body,

I might be able to walk around

on some of the heavy planets.

On Uranus, for example.

Or on Jupiter.

So that is a possibility that's suggested.

Another possibility is simply living inside a computer.

To where we're living in a virtual world,

a virtual reality.

And if that's the case,

there's certainly no problem with space.

We'd be able to cram the entire human race

into that computer over there.

Anyone making this trip knows that

it may be a trip that goes on forever.

Anyone making this trip knows

that it may be the fact

that every single person in suspension,

including this dear lady,

may never be revived.

It's a crapshoot.

But we're the only game in town.

Ready?

Yeah.

You guys are not going to get to see

the very bottom things.

That's the biological.

I think that's the biological.

I can tell by the weight.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Not there.

It seems obvious this is the way to go.

Cryonics has some religious aspects

in that our heaven, in a way,

is the future.

And our god, in a way,

is technology.

One of our associates

suggests a program

where you send

a bunch of volunteers

into the rainforest.

And the volunteers

are not trained people.

They cannot tell an endangered plant

or animal from anything else.

But what they do

is they do grab-the-bag fashion.

They have shovels

and they grab some of this.

They see a plant over here,

they grab that.

And they get all this kind of stuff.

And 99.9% of this

is going to be junk.

But 1% may be very valuable.

It may be a plant or an animal

from the rainforest

or some other environment

which has previously

not been discovered

and which will be wiped out

unless it's saved right now

and saved in the best way that we can.

I would love to have

whole ecosystems

stored in some of the vaults

that the American Cryonics Society

is constructing

in out-of-the-way places

in order to time machine forward

some of the library of life

from the 20th century.